Mark, Dale,
I agree with you completely. In those days we were so excited when we got a Campy gruppo in, we threw it on a frame that either went out the door with a happy customer or was hung up in the showroom.
No one cared if it was made in 1974 or 1978 for that matter, the glitz and vanity factor blotted out any concerns about matching components... Blinded by the glow! ;-)
I think a lot of people think that there was something magic and sacred about the work shops of premium quality marques Campy, Cinelli, Masi and others.
When I saw photos of the Campy and Cinelli shops in the mid 70s my first response was "These are blacksmith shops".
Many manufacturers of cycling components were using equipment that dated back to before WW II. Until the US Bike Boom and attending boom in France, most of these businesses produced pedestrian quality equipment for transportation bikes plus a small amount of premium quality parts for the tiny (on a worldwide scale) premium racing bike market.
Cranksets were not made 1 set at a time. They made a batch of left arms and a batch of right arms. The right arms take longer to make because there is a lot more machining involved.
The finished crank arms were probably placed in bins to be boxed up as needed. If Campy didn't use FIFO (First In- First Out)inventory control then it's easy to see how cranksets with mis-matched date codes got shipped.
Modern manufacturing methods didn't appear in the European cycling component industry until the late 1970s.
"Hand Crafted" is the operant term that should be considered when discussing these products.
Watch Antique Road Show on PBS in the US and the original program on UK tv to get a better understanding of some of the things that make an item rare or valuable.
Chas. Colerich Oakland, CA USA
Mark Petry wrote:
> Dale wrote :
>> they pay no attention to how long the brakes have been sitting there as
>> compared to cranks (or whatever). It just didn't matter to them. Nor did
>> it matter to us in the bike shop. Upon receipt and installation on a
>> frame, we just bolted stuff on. We all had no idea that future
>> enthusiasts would be matching numbers so carefully!
>
> Nor did we, on the left side of the country. The seemingly random serial
> numbers of Cinelli frames is
>
> another unsolveable mystery. Since I built the registry in 1999, I've
> explained the lack of pattern
>
> to hundreds of mystified new Cinelli owners. No sequence No pattern. No
> correlation to date or
>
> anything else. They are astonished. Jaws go slack. "B..But.what if you
> reverse the digits and do a
>
> 3rd order polynomial expansion and then convert to Base 6 ? Have you looked
> at that ?"
>
> I smile. Got an email from a prospective ebay bidder on an auction I'm
> running. He asks
>
> ** "does it have the "<C>" marking on it? "**
>
> No, I replied, it just says Patent Campagnolo Italy.
>
> I actually think that this need for order, this obsession with detail takes
> us away from the essence of the sport.
>
> Forget about how cool it is to speed downhill on a beautiful day with the
> tires humming and the sunlight
>
> winking thru the trees - instead let's worry about finding crankarms with
> matching date codes.
>
> In my view at least that's not what collecting or being a connoisseur is all
> about, but maybe it's because those
>
> concerned with such things have nothing better to do!
>
>>From the catapult of
>
> Mark Petry
> Bainbridge Island, WA